Bubba Wallace on his Pocono crash: 'I didn't know if I was going die or not'

The most important thing to know about Darrell "Bubba" Wallace Jr.'s terrifying crash in NASCAR's Cup Series race Sunday is that he is OK. Aside from biting his cheek and banging up his foot a little, the driver of the No. 43 Chevrolet is fine after the car's brakes failed, and he slammed into the outside track wall at Pocono Raceway.

Filling in for his NASCAR BFF Ryan Blaney on The Glass Case of Emotion podcast this week, Wallace explained what was going through his mind before the impact.

He guessed he had seven or eight seconds to think about it between realizing when his brakes failed and actually hitting the wall and explained:

"You literally think, 'Am I gonna die? Am I gonna get knocked out?' Because the way I was heading for the fence was head-on straight. …

"I thought I was going to hit head-on. My facial expression, I wish you could have seen it. I told (my girlfriend) Amanda, 'Yeah, you jumped around the corner and scared the hell out of me, and I'm like, "Oooh!"' This one was like petrified. I didn't know if I was going to die or not."

(AP Photo/John Raoux)(Photo: AP)

As recently retired NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. explained on his own podcast this week, it's rare that drivers have enough time to have those thoughts before crashing. But it sounds like this fear is fairly universal when they know they're about to have a hard impact.

With just five races left in the regular season, Wallace is 25th in the driver standings, well outside the 16-driver cutoff. To qualify for the 10-race playoffs this fall, he'll likely have to win one of the final regular-season races.